The last Portland Data Visualization Meetup occurred way back in March 2009. That’s way too long to go without a good data viz meetup, so there’s going to be another one. We’ll have five 10 minute presentations and a bunch of networking time. Webtrends will again graciously host us on their top floor.

The event is open to everyone interested in or working in the field of data visualization. This means designers, programmers, information architects, data miners, anthropologists, ect. We’re expecting a similar amount of people to last time, but the presentations will be limited to 10 minutes each or less.

Bring business cards and an excitement to connect with others in this field.

The second Portland Data Visualization Group will be held on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 from 7:30Pm-9:00Pm at Webtrends.

851 SW 6th Ave.
Portland OR 97204
(map)

RSVP on Upcoming or view this event on Calagator.

Agenda:

The second meeeting of the Portland Data Visualization Group will serve as an introduction to what’s going on in the world of data viz. There will be five presentations of 10 minutes each. There are three openings left, so if you would like to demonstrate something you’re working on, please E-mail me or comment below.

If you’re interested in Data Visualization, please come to this event.

Google Group:

Ed Borasky started a Google group called pdx-visualization. As the name implies, it is a group for Portland-area people interested in languages and techniques for visualization of data. http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-visualization

Flickr Photos:

I’ve been collecting interesting data viz photos for a while now and posting them to Flickr. They’re all accessible on my Flickr account in this set. Most pictures contain descriptions and links to the viz sources.

I hope to see you all there!
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About

Amber Case, (@caseorganic is a Cyborg Anthropologist studying the interaction between humans and computers and how our relationship with information is changing the way we think, act, and understand the world around us.

I first heard about Autopagerizer through Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web. He demonstrated it by doing a Google search and scrolling down to the bottom of the page.Except there wasn’t and “bottom of the page”. Instead, page 2 of the Google search results loaded. And when he scrolled down to the bottom of page two, page three loaded.

“This doesn’t just work for Google search results,” he said, “It works for Flickr too!”. He wisked over to Flickr with quick Apple+Tab, and scrolled down to the bottom of his photostream. It worked. The next page automatically loaded. It was great.

“See?” he said, grinning, “it’s the best way to view tons of Flickr photos at once”.

I was hooked. I knew I’d never go back to browing the Internet the same way. I quickly installed Greasemonkey and installed the Autopagerize over it. It was simple to do, and you can do it within the next five or ten minutes.

First, Install Greasemonkey for Firefox

First, you’ll need to install the Greasemonkey plugin, so make sure you’re running Firefox.If you don’t run Firefox (which you should, especially if you’re running Internet Explorer) then you can download Firefox here (it’s free).

Greasemonkey installs just like any other plugin. You may have to restart the browser after you install it. Just make sure to copy this URL when you close it so you can come back and finish the rest of the install.

Next, Install Autopagerize

Okay, now you’ve installed Greasemonkey. Now, all you have to go is install Autopagerize.

Got it installed? Great! Now type something into Google and scroll down to the bottom of the page. The second page should load automatically. If it does not, then try restarting your browser.

A Note of Caution:

Jeremy Logan makes a good point when he says: “this is a neat and useful addon, but you should be aware that if you use other Greasemonkey scripts or add-ons to modify pages then they generally run once the page is loaded. This means the scripts won’t run on the second (third, fouth…) page’s content once it’s loaded”. Thanks, Jeremy!

That aside, it doesn’t end there. There’s a bevy of scripts out there that can help make your Internet experience much more enjoyable. Autopagerize is just the tip of the iceberg.

Other Greasemonkey Scripts You Might Want to Try

Nested Twitter Replies

Nested Twitter Replies looks for the phrase “in reply to [user]” and recursively gets all replies to display the conversation thread as a nested block. You can get Nested Twitter Replies here

Remove All Facebook Ads

This is a cool Greasemonkey script because it removes all the ads from your Facebook experience. Unless you like ads. If you do, that’s fine with me. You don’t have to install the script.

Download Remove All Facebook Ads here.

Better Twitter

Adds auto reloading, continuous scrolling, @reply highlights, last read tweet, auto-completion of friends in @replies, @mentions, and direct messages, inline replies, minified layout, map for coordinates, retweeting, tweet preview, and more!

You can download Better Twitter here.

Videoembed

First off all, this script is awesome. If you search for something on Google and a video comes up in your search results, you can play the video right in your search results without having to go to the page.

But this script doesn’t just work for Google - it works for all websites, and videos from most video sites, like glumbert, metacafe, google, yahoo, photobucket, youtube, myspace…(and many others) so you can view the video without opening a new page.

You can download Videoembed here.

Want More Scripts?

Since you have Greasemonkey, you can install any scripts you want by finding scripts through http://userscripts.org/, an entire database of related scripts.

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About:

Amber Case is a cyborg anthropologist, consultant, writer, and analyst from Portland, Oregon. You can contact her at caseorganic at gmail.com, or on Twitter at @caseorganic.

Fictional character creation is a useful tool in creating an intriguing narrative that captures attention, especially since the character can be easily adapted to fit different digital spaces, such as Video, Microblogging, and Image sharing sites. Media diversity  is also useful in building and unifying online communities that access with media in separate channels.

Creating a consistent brand all through many all social sites one of the best ways to maximize the value of a character or brand campaign.

Ryan Summers and I created a presentation on how to track users across various social media sites using mostly free tools. It was given at Web Analytics Wednesday in Portland, Oregon.

History

A few weeks before the MITX awards ceremony, ISITE Design created a short video called “El Consultador” as an introduction to other agencies.

The El Consultador campaign generated diverse social data. This created issues with tracking data from multiple social media sites across problems with social media is that these is no singular way to gather and rank all of the data over time. Tools like Radian6 and Trucast are in use by larger agencies and businesses, but there exist an increasing amount of free tools for data visualization and engagement reporting that are available online.

This Powerpoint was made for an audible presentation. I collaborated with Ryan Summers of ISITE design on it and presented it at Web Analytics Wednesday. I will attempt to explain the results/processes in a textual manner here.

Profiles Created for the El Consultador Campaign

We used analytic data from Flickr, Youtube, Vimeo and Twitter to determine the most successful aspects of the campaign.

On Vimeo:
http://vimeo.com/2309025

On YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz6jt_aSFg0

On Flickr:
http://flickr.com/photos/elconsultador/
(Workers at ISITE design superimposed the Consultador face onto a variety of characters in pop culture).

On Twitter:
http://twitter.com/elconsultador

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Key Performance Indicators

We determined a number of Key Performance Indicators of the social media campaign.

-Direct awareness of ISITE design agency
-3rd part mentions
-Social media followers (number of Twitter followers, comments on YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr).
-Direct communication

YouTube Reports

We used YouTube reports to track the engagement with the video campaign.

Data tracked included:

-Age Demograpics
-Gender Demograpics
-Discovery Sources
-Timeline Trends

The campaign was viewed predominately by 26-45 year old males and mostly during and around the date of the MITX awards. This is the demographic it was aimed at.

Vimeo Stats

Vimeo is a high-quality Video sharing site with a limited but very engaged traffic demographic. We used Vimeo data to find more about who engaged with the campaign and compared it to YouTube data.

Flickr Reports

Flickr has a reporting tool for image views over time for every image. The data can be accessed with a premium Flickr account. We used this data to determine the most viewed (strongest/most impactful) pictures associated with El Consutador on the El Consultador account, and which images should be associated with the campaign on other sites (if future campaigns needed to be implemented).

Google Analytics

We used data from Google Analytics for the page on which El Consultador existed on the ISISTE Webpage. Data was tracked from the “El Consultator” and “MITX” keywords. New visitors and direct traffic were also analyzed.

Social Nodes

The campaign was picked up by three prominent bloggers, including Chris Brogan, Davaid Armano (VP of Experience Design with Critical Mass), and C.C. Chapman (Prominent figure in the community of podcasting, new media, cofounder of the Advanced Guard, a marketing company which focuses on utilizing social media and other emerging technologies).

Blogs linking to the campaigns were not found via inlink searches in Yahoo! Site Explorer, but with an intelligence feed created in Yahoo! Pipes (see below)

Tracking Overall Data

Custom intelligence feeds are useful for checking overall propagation of data. Yahoo! Pipes provides a free custom way to aggregate data across Google blog search, Google news, Technorati, Flickr, and Twitter.

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Data Visualization and Tracking for Twitter

I presented an extended set of tools and data visualization methods for Twitter. Links for all of them are here:

Reports/Demographic Research:
Summize
http://tweetstats.com/

TweetVolume
http://tweetvolume.com/

Twitter Mobile (vs. Twitter in browser)
http://m.twitter.com/home

Neoformix Twitter Stream Graphs
http://www.neoformix.com/Projects/TwitterStreamGraphs/view.php (I provided a live demo of this).

Twitter Stream Graphs are a simple way to rsearch keyword volume associated with a brand or campaign. Neoformix also tracks keywords over time, meaning that one can see when a certain keyword became popular.
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Future Suggestions:
More Flickr photos could be linked to all of the other accounts, such as Flickr, Youtube, and Vimeo. Linking together social media campaigns in a more robust fashion will affect CTR’s by making the campaign spreadable across various demographic profiles and types of social media users.

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Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist who studies new media and the relationship between humans and computers. She enjoys data visualization (click for more info on conference tracking), search engine optimization (ask), and how marketing works in the online ecosystem.

She graduated from Lewis & Clark College in May 2008 with a degree in Sociology/Anthropology and wrote her thesis on cell phones and the effect of technology on cultural constructions of space and privacy.

You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic, or drop her an E-mail at caseorganic[at]gmai[dot]com. She’s spoken at various conferences including MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 3, Inverge: The Interactive Convergence Conferece, Ignite Portland, and Ignite Boulder.

She also blogs at Nerdabout.com and http://www.blog.makerlab.org, a Portland new media incubator. She founded CyborgCamp, an unconference on the future of humans and technology. She is also involved with building and studying electronics with DorkbotPDX.

Sites like Smashing Magazine are always releasing free icon sets. However, I wanted to make something custom for OakHazelnut.com. With this in mind, created the following icon set for my Twitter, Flickr and RSS profiles.

Download Icon Set .eps

The set is free to download and free to use. However, if you use the icons in a commercial project or on a client site, please link back to http://oakhazelnut.com somewhere on the site. A big thanks to Bram Pitoyo for helping out with the shading. Enjoy and happy socializing!

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Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Internet Marketing Consultant from Portland, Oregon. You can follow her online @caseorganic.

Twitterers may enjoy Tweetvolume for it’s ability to graphically display the search volumes of up to five terms at once.

While this is an interesting concept, it does not show when and where the posts were created. Neither does it provide data on what users have posted what.
My vote still goes to Addictomatic, because of the sheer volume and choice of search results.

When I type in ‘Anthropology’, I get results from 16+ sites, including Twitter (where, who, when), Youtube, Flickr, Technorati, Google Blog Search, Delicious Tags, Ask.com News, ect.

Conclusion: Tweetvolume is useful for volume comparison of terms in one space, while Addictomatic is more encompassing. However, neither provide dates of data, and thus do not provide “to the second” updates useful for creating a catchy targeted post. And, since they both do really different things, I may be comparing apples and oranges.